WhatsApp Business is now available: start in 3 easy steps

Aug 16, 2018 • 3 minutes read

Big news: WhatsApp is available for companies. That means that you can now add WhatsApp Business to your communication channels via our API. But what possibilities does this chat app offer to get in touch with your customers?

Why WhatsApp?

WhatsApp has no less than 1.5 billion active users in 180 countries. In many countries, including the Netherlands, WhatsApp has become the most popular communication channel. This is the reason that many companies have wanted to access this chat app for quite some time now but until recently this was not officially possible. Fortunately, WhatsApp has now officially opened this channel, so that your company can also use this channel to get in touch with your customers.

Business WhatsApp features: conversational commerce

WhatsApp Business offers some valuable features that can help you as a company to take customer communication to a higher level. Consider, for example, turning on absence messages and a standard first greeting so that your client feels heard immediately. You can also set up 'quick answers' that can be send with a keyword when a frequently asked question is asked.

You also have space on WhatsApp Business to share company information. This includes your address, location on a map, business category, picture, opening hours, e-mail address and website (s). You also have insight into important statistics, such as the number of sent, delivered and read messages. If a message cannot be delivered, for example because your receiver is offline, your message will be sent from our platform via SMS, RCS or Voice.

With the WhatsApp Business link from CM.com, you can easily and completely personalize messages. Do not only think about the name of your conversation partner, but also the history. For example, what did he bought last time, where is he located and how did previous conversations go? By continuing your various contact moments with your individual customers as a conversation, even over different channels, you can better support your customers and create a stronger bond between your company and the customer.

Why use WhatsApp Business

Secure communication via end-to-end encryption

Trusted by your customers, verified by WhatsApp

Easy integration via our Business Communication API

Personalized communication via our dashboard

All this is just a selection of the many functionalities that you can benefit from as a company. Do you want to know everything about how you can use WhatsApp Business? Sign up for CM Inspires on August 31 in Breda, or read further below.

WhatsApp Business applications

Because WhatsApp allows you to share rich media, it offers many opportunities for companies to better support customers. Think for example of sending QR codes, route descriptions, reservation confirmations and instruction videos. In this way all relevant information can be shared in one personalized conversation. Due to the end-to-end encryption of WhatsApp messages, the content of your conversation is not visible to others and information can be shared securely.

Getting started immediately with WhatsApp

Where WhatsApp is free for consumers, this will not always be the case for companies. WhatsApp has announced that they will soon start calculating 0.05 to 0.13 cents per message. WhatsApp also charges a fee when companies approach consumers and when a company does not respond to a message from a customer within 24 hours. When a customer starts a conversation with a company, the conversation (provided the response is within 24 hours) is free.

More about whatsapp business

is content marketer and makes sure our readers always have interesting blogs to read about how to engage with customers. During the day, she answers 1K questions in her role as communications advisor. At night she preferably sleeps.